The topic of ‘governance’ is one that has gained popularity, and the term is now used to embrace a range of concepts. This unit establishes some basic principles that will form the basis of your study. You will have the opportunity to consider how well these principles match up with your own observations of corporate organisations and behaviour

This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Issues in international financial reporting (B853) which is no longe

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We hope this unit has set you thinking about how you and others make decisions. It has been a very brief and to some extent shallow introduction to some quite complex ideas. The reference list should give you some pointers to further resources which will help you explore this topic in greater depth.

The evaluation report will often contain recommendations for further actions and these may lead to new project ideas. Recommendations may relate to processes and procedures within the organisation. Project evaluation and debriefing can be a learning experience for the organisation as a whole, as well as for individuals. For example, British Petroleum gathers the lessons learnt from post-project appraisals in a series of booklets that are then used as guidance for writing project proposals. In

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Discourse researchers have also argued that all talk is dialogical, meaning that when we speak we combine together many different pieces of other conversations and texts and, significantly, other voices. We are often quoting. Sometimes this quoting is marked as when we say ‘he said . . . then she said …’ but often it is indirect and unmarked as people take over the voices of others. We carry into our talk and writing fragments from many different sources which carry some of their

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This unit explores the processes through which we comprehend the world around us. When it comes to understanding and explaining the way that social life operates, social scientists draw from a conceptual tool kit, just as we possess a conceptual tool kit for watching a movie or as a spectator at any sports event. There are times when all human beings feel that something appears to be plausible or appears to be false and we are quite aware that others would disagree with our own point of view.

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These case studies introduce various typologies of heritage and the methods used to study them. They help draw attention to the fact that the heritage traditions in England, Scotland and Wales are not the same and are enshrined in slightly different legislation. Every study of heritage requires an understanding of the legal context and the traditions and history governing the object of heritage.

The first case study, by Mary-Catherine Garden, involves public memories of two significant

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This broad-based unit will introduce you to a number of different aspects of sustainability that impact on Scotland and the wider world. It wil appeal to anyone with an interest in a sustainable future in the context of contemporary Scottish society.

To access this material click on the unit link below. It leads to a separate OpenLearn unit and will open in a new window.

Are we now better equipped to answer the three questions posed in Section 1.1?

How are identities formed?

We present ourselves to others through everyday interactions, through the way we speak and dress, marking ourselves as the same as those with whom we share an identity and different from those with whom we do not. We use

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Young children's gender categories are highly stereotyped. This can lead to assured predictions of an individual's preferences based upon knowledge of their gender, and the kinds of activities that they may typically engage in. Children develop such rigid gender categories in their search for certainty about gender. These categories are essentialist, having a simple in-group and out-group distinction that children use for understanding masculinity and femininity, and for defining their own ge

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Gilleard and Higgs (2000) more fully develop some of the ideas explored by Giddens (1994) in their useful and comprehensive introduction to post-structural readings of older age. Elder's (1977) life history account offers compelling insights into the intersections of class and gender through a socialist lens, and represents an early and interesting example of the life history and biographical method. Chamberlayne et al. (2000) provide comprehensive and thoughtful insights into biographical me

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In this section, we explore how experiences of being an older person in the nineteenth century were constituted through the operation of the 1834 New Poor Law Act and the processes of industrial change that ran parallel to it. We examine the way this constructed the lives of older people as ‘other’ to the emergent ‘normal’ (adult, relatively youthful, male paid worker) and trace its legacy to reveal points of continuity and change.

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Anderson, M. (1993) ‘The social implications of demographic change’ in Thompson, F.M.L. (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain Vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bainham, A. (1999) ‘Defining parenthood: parentage, parenthood and parental responsibility – subtle, elusive yet important distinctions’ in Bainham, A., Sclater, S.D. and Richards, M. (eds) What is a Parent? A Socio-LegAuthor(s): The Open University

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Like other areas of personal life and sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Section 1.4), marriage was emerging as a more explicit area of social policy and state regulation, and parenthood and sexuality were being re-examined and reshaped within marriage. In Section 3 we explore changes in the leg

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Feminist theory underpins one of the most influential historiographies of fertility decline and it allows us to foreground gender as a dominant feature in questions of heterosexuality and parenthood. This is not to suggest that divisions of class, ‘race’, (dis)ability and generation are unimportant in this historical phenomenon, and any full understanding of fertility decline would be incomplete without including them. But in this unit the main focus will be on gender and these other soci

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Consider joining a learned society or professional organisation. They can be very useful for conference bulletins as well as in-house publications, often included in the subscription. Don't forget to ask about student rates. Try looking for the websites of learned societies associated with your subject area (e.g. The Royal Society, the Institute of Electrical

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